The fog of war seems to have enveloped President Trump and his minions. After two weeks of armed conflict with Iran, they have yet to offer a lucid and realistic explanation of America’s war aims.
The White House’s failure to dispatch top officials to last Sunday’s talk shows to drum up public support for the war was telling. Apparently, none could be trusted to speak for a president who himself lurches incoherently from one rationale to another.
Meanwhile, political battle lines have hardened at home. Republican lawmakers rubber stamp whatever Trump wants, while Democrats demand a halt to hostilities, pending a vote on a war powers resolution.
With American forces engaged in combat, this isn’t the best moment for a polarizing domestic fight over constitutional prerogatives. But Democrats are right to insist that the president bring his case for war before Congress for hearings, questions and debate.
The federal government’s big effort to build out broadband is facing a problem you don’t see often in Washington: There’s now more money left over in the program than anyone knows what to do with.
Almost five years ago, Congress committed approximately $41 billion to connect all Americans to high-speed internet as part of its bipartisan infrastructure bill. But in a rare moment of wisdom, the Trump administration revamped the effort last year by nixing a number of ill-conceived rules that had slowed its progress and added to costs. That included removing most requirements unrelated to broadband deployment and opening up more opportunities for traditional fiber cable alternatives — like fixed wireless and low-Earth orbit satellite constellations — to service households.
In short, the initiative got an abundance-style overhaul with a laser focus on delivering on the core goal of getting all Americans connected.
Richard D. Kahlenberg, whose organization, the Progressive Policy Institute, recently issued a report on economic diversity in admissions, said that building economically diverse classes is beneficial to universities, whether or not it also results in increased racial diversity.
“It brings students with different sets of life experiences to campus, increases ideological diversity and opens paths to leadership in America to more low-income and working-class students,” Mr. Kahlenberg said.
WASHINGTON — A new report from the Progressive Policy Institute (PPI) finds that many of America’s most selective colleges are expanding opportunities for low-income and working-class students in the wake of the Supreme Court’s 2023 decision ending race-based admissions. The report concludes that universities are increasingly turning to “economic affirmative action,” giving greater consideration to applicants from disadvantaged economic backgrounds, as a new pathway to maintaining diverse campuses.
Authored by Richard Kahlenberg, Director of PPI’s American Identity Project, and policy fellow Aidan Shannon, the report, “The Rise of Economic Affirmative Action: Universities are Finding New and Better Paths to Diversity,” examines admissions data from the 2024 and 2025 admissions cycles following the Supreme Court’s ruling in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard. The analysis finds that many feared a dramatic collapse in campus diversity after the ruling, but those predictions have largely not materialized.
Instead, universities appear to be adapting their admissions practices. The report finds that minority enrollment declines at many selective colleges have been modest, while a growing number of institutions are enrolling higher shares of economically disadvantaged students.
A new analysis by PPI shows that the share of students receiving Pell Grants increased at 15 of the 18 highly selective institutions with publicly available data. In 10 of those schools, the share of Pell Grant recipients rose by more than 20%.
“These early results suggest that universities are finding new ways to sustain diversity without relying on racial preferences,” said Kahlenberg. “Expanding opportunity for low-income and working-class students is not only legally viable, but also a fair and broadly supported way to build diverse campuses.”
The report also finds that universities have begun adopting a range of strategies to increase socioeconomic diversity, including:
Expanding financial aid programs
Recruiting more aggressively at low-income high schools
Reconsidering admissions practices that disproportionately benefit wealthy applicants
At the same time, the report argues that more work remains to ensure that selective colleges serve as engines of social mobility. While the rise in economic diversity is encouraging, most elite institutions still enroll fewer low-income students than the national average for Pell Grant recipients.
PPI’s analysis recommends that colleges and policymakers take additional steps to expand opportunity, including:
Increasing the share of Pell-eligible students
Recruiting more students from high-poverty neighborhoods
Considering family wealth alongside income in admissions decisions
Eliminating legacy preferences that advantage the children of alumni
The report also urges policymakers to encourage greater socioeconomic diversity through targeted incentives and accountability measures, such as adjusting taxes on large university endowments and requiring institutions to disclose more detailed data on student income backgrounds.
“The shift toward economic affirmative action is a promising development for both fairness and social cohesion,” said Kahlenberg. “Policies that expand opportunity based on economic disadvantage can bring students of all backgrounds together while strengthening public support for higher education.”
Founded in 1989, PPI is a catalyst for policy innovation and political reform based in Washington, D.C. Its mission is to create radically pragmatic ideas for moving America beyond ideological and partisan deadlock. Find an expert and learn more about PPI by visiting progressivepolicy.org. Follow us @ppi.
Many feared that the Supreme Court’s 2023 decision banning the use of race in college admissions would deal a crushing blow to campus diversity. Before oral arguments in the case, more than 30 liberal arts schools filed an amicus brief warning that without the benefit of affirmative action, Black students might fall to just 2.1% of all new undergrads at selective institutions, a return to “early 1960s levels.” When the ruling came down, the court’s three liberal justices wrote in their dissent that it would have a “devastating impact” on minority enrollment.
Thankfully, those dire predictions have yet to come true. In this report, we review data from the 2024 and 2025 admissions cycles showing that, in the wake of Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard, higher education institutions have not given up on diversity. Instead, they have seemingly begun the hard work of finding new paths to it. Two main facts jump out:
Minority student enrollment fell less than critics of the court’s ruling forecasted. Most (though not all) of the country’s top colleges and universities avoided massive declines, and some saw barely any drop at all.
In response to the demise of traditional, race-based affirmative action, top-rated schools appear to have begun enrolling more economically disadvantaged students, opening their doors to a group of learners who add their own important dimension of diversity to campus culture. In a new analysis, we show that the share of students receiving Pell Grants, which provide aid to low- and middle-income undergrads, has increased at 15 of the 18 highly selective institutions that currently provide public, up-to-date data. In 10 cases, the share of Pell Grant-eligible students increased more than 20%.
Admitting more low-income and working-class students may have helped some schools limit declines in Black and Hispanic enrollment — though, as we discuss later in our paper, how much so is actually unclear.
Regardless, there is a fair amount of good news in these results. First, it is a relief that minority enrollment did not implode as some anticipated. Diverse campuses are good for students and good for our society. When schools bring young people from different ethnic backgrounds together, it deepens learning and increases understanding across races while reducing stereotypes. It also helps diversify America’s leadership class, which tends to be drawn from the graduates of highly selective colleges.
The rise in economic diversity is also very welcome, and overdue. America’s top colleges have a long, unfortunate history of virtually ignoring economic class in their admissions decisions. As a result, they have fallen short in their role as ladders for social mobility and failed to build student bodies that truly reflect the wider nation.
The move toward economic affirmative action as a means to promote diversity is a step in the right political direction for higher education institutions that have lost much of the public’s support in recent years. Racial preferences were always unpopular; 68% of Americans backed the Supreme Court’s decision striking them down. By contrast, strong majorities of Americans think it is only fair to provide a leg up in college admissions to students who have overcome economic obstacles.
But the change is also a step toward greater fairness. Race used to be the primary obstacle to opportunity in America, and there was a time when the academic achievement gap between Black and white students was twice as large as the achievement gap between rich and poor. But America has changed in the intervening decades, and today the reverse is true: the achievement gap between rich and poor is roughly twice the gap between Black and white students, according to Stanford University’s Sean Reardon.
And the shift from race to economic need as the basis for special consideration is likely to strengthen social cohesion. While racial preferences were always a divisive and unpopular means of achieving integration, economic affirmative action can do the important work of bringing students of different backgrounds together but in a way that emphasizes a common American identity rather than reinforcing racial differences.
While the early admissions trends we document are encouraging, they cannot be an excuse for complacency. Minority enrollment need not have declined even as much as it has. Colleges could still do more to recruit more low-income and working-class students. We believe legislators and educational institutions could address both issues using the tools of economic affirmative action, even without the crutch of blunt racial preferences.
While giving an admissions edge to lower-income applicants is a good start, more universities should also offer a leg up to students from poor neighborhoods or from families with low net worths. These policies are racially neutral and can be justified as a matter of fairness but in practice would also give a larger boost on average to underrepresented minorities, offsetting some of the declines in Black and Hispanic enrollment since Students for Fair Admissions. University leaders and policymakers should also take steps to end legacy admissions that give an unfair advantage to the children of wealthy alumni. Congress could prod schools into action by reducing taxes on their endowments in return for adopting these changes and dialing up the tax for bad actors. For Democratic politicians looking to revive their party’s image with working-class voters, this is a straightforward opportunity to champion their interests. We’ve avoided a worst-case scenario for diversity on campus, and begun moving in a new, promising direction. But there’s still much work to be done.
FACT: 2025 trade growth was the fastest since 2021.
THE NUMBERS:
2024
2026
Working satellites
~11,500
~18,000
Fiber-optic cables
561 cables
~637 cables
Container ships
30.4 million TEU
33.9 million TEU
Freighter planes
2,375
~2,675
WHAT THEY MEAN:
Two of the three big drivers of “economic integration” have faded or gone dark. The Trump administration’s tariff binge, even after the Supreme Court scrapped its “international emergency” decrees, leaves the world economy more “closed” than it was a year ago. Peace among big powers is growing steadily shakier. This ought to chill commerce — that was the path of the 1930s — but so far it hasn’t. In fact, the WTO’s calculations of “trade growth by volume” (essentially, though not exactly, an inflation-adjusted real-dollar count of export growth) put trade growth in 2025 faster than any year since the anomalous pandemic-recovery year 2021, and well above the last decade’s 3.0% average.
2025
3.60%
2024
2.90%
2023
-1.20%
2022
2.70%
2021
9.70%
2020
-5.30%
2019
0.10%
2018
3.00%
2017
4.70%
2016
1.70%
Why? In contrast to the 1930s, rising trade barriers aren’t a worldwide policy. Back then, lots of big economies followed the Hoover administration into high-tariff isolationism. In the 2020s, by contrast, most have kept policy stable, and many are continuing to integrate and ‘liberalize’. The European Union and South America’s “Mercosur” group (Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay, Uruguay) signed a Free Trade Agreement in January; the U.K. has joined the Comprehensive and Progressive Trans-Pacific Partnership; the African Continental Free Trade Area just got its 49th ratification, etc.
The U.S.’s large share of trade — 12.8% of goods & services imports, 9.8% of exports as of 2024 — means American policy choices should nonetheless affect total trade flows at least a bit. But that impact may be cushioned or entirely offset, though, by the strength of the third driver: the steady decline in communication and logistics costs as physical infrastructure improves.
Even over the last two years, it’s become noticeably cheaper and easier to move information and goods around the world. Some indicators:
Information carriers: Much of the world’s $8 trillion in services trade (setting aside personal travel and transport) moves in digital form, converted to information and then sent under the sea along a glass wire or through the sky via satellite beam.
Cables: Fiber-optic cables carry most information traffic, and therefore most services trade. Cable-tracker TeleGeography’s count of active cables has risen from 561 to a projected 637 this year, and newer cables are not only numerous but more powerful than their older siblings. As an example, last year’s “Bifrost” (oddly named for the “rainbow bridge” to heaven in Norse myth) is a 16,500-kilometer wire connecting Singapore to California, with branches in Oregon, Indonesia, and the Philippines. Bifrost can carry 32.5 terabits of data per second. By comparison, all of the 111 world cables in 2010 put together could carry about 239.5 terabits per second. A decade earlier, as fiber-optics replaced the older copper wires, the total world capacity was below 2 terabits per second.
Satellites: Satellites carry less information than cables but offer more options with fewer geographic dead spots, and are multiplying even faster than cables: Jonathan’s endearingly “2005 blogger-style web page” count of operating satellites, having risen from about 5,000 operating satellites in 2020 to 9,100 in early 2024, likely passed 15,000 this month. Liftoff schedules suggest the total may be near 20,000 when the next Congress takes office in January 2027.
Goods carriers: Luxuries and perishables, manufacturing inputs, metals, ores and energy, appliances and clothes, all move in ships, trucks, pipelines, and planes. About 45% of the $24 trillion in annual merchandise trade — measured by value rather than weight — travels by container ship, and 35% by plane.
Container ships: As of early 2026, container trackers at Alphaliner report 7,520 container ships steaming around the world’s oceans. Taken together, they can carry 33.9 million TEU worth of containers. (TEU: “twenty-foot equivalent units,” a standard measurement standing for a container 20 feet long, 8 feet high, and 8.5 feet wide.) The container fleet of 2024 had 6,464 ships with a capacity of 31.4 million TEU. For a more dramatic counterpoint, the entire worldwide container ship count in the year 2000 was 2,595 ships with 4.3 million TEU. So the last two years of yardwork have added nearly the equivalent of the whole millennial fleet. The Bipartisan Infrastructure Act of the Biden era, meanwhile, put $17 billion into U.S. seaports — more efficient terminals, better links to roads and railways, etc. — meaning that even in the U.S., cargo arrivals are incrementally getting faster and cheaper, offsetting some tariff increases.
Air freighters: The count of active large civil aircraft, meanwhile, has jumped from 28,400 to over 35,500, or by about a fifth. This isn’t simple to relate directly to air cargo flows, as some planes move only people, some just cargo, and many do both. But the count of planes strictly meant for cargo gives at least a sense of direction. Boeing’s 2020 Commercial Outlook estimated that by 2039, the world’s delivery services would be using 2,439 freighter planes. Their most recent edition says we’ve already arrived: by 2024, the cargo fleet employed 2,375 freighters — 920 at standard size, 800 medium widebodies, 655 large widebodies — and about 300 more took off in 2025 and 2026. Their new long-term projection is that the cargo fleet will reach 3,975 planes by 2044, up 70%, with the fastest growth in the largest planes.
In sum: So far, the world of the 2020s isn’t following the example set in the early 1930s. As the Trump administration is trying to make trade more expensive and difficult for Americans, other forces are trying to make it cheaper and easier. As to which will win out, from the U.S. angle, it seems to be a draw so far. From the world perspective (should the Trump program remain in place for a while), the apparent trend is for the administration to diminish parts of the American role in the global economy, rather than shrink the global economy itself.
FURTHER READING
PPI’s four principles for response to tariffs and economic isolationism:
Defend the Constitution and oppose rule by decree;
Connect tariff policy to growth, work, prices and family budgets, and living standards;
Ed Gresser is Vice President and Director for Trade and Global Markets at PPI.
Ed returns to PPI after working for the think tank from 2001-2011. He most recently served as the Assistant U.S. Trade Representative for Trade Policy and Economics at the Office of the United States Trade Representative (USTR). In this position, he led USTR’s economic research unit from 2015-2021, and chaired the 21-agency Trade Policy Staff Committee.
Ed began his career on Capitol Hill before serving USTR as Policy Advisor to USTR Charlene Barshefsky from 1998 to 2001. He then led PPI’s Trade and Global Markets Project from 2001 to 2011. After PPI, he co-founded and directed the independent think tank ProgressiveEconomy until rejoining USTR in 2015. In 2013, the Washington International Trade Association presented him with its Lighthouse Award, awarded annually to an individual or group for significant contributions to trade policy.
Ed is the author of Freedom from Want: American Liberalism and the Global Economy (2007). He has published in a variety of journals and newspapers, and his research has been cited by leading academics and international organizations including the WTO, World Bank, and International Monetary Fund. He is a graduate of Stanford University and holds a Master’s Degree in International Affairs from Columbia Universities and a certificate from the Averell Harriman Institute for Advanced Study of the Soviet Union.
As the four-year anniversary of the 2022 enactment of Europe’s Digital Markets Act (DMA) approaches, the European Commission is assessing the act’s performance and evaluating whether adjustments are needed. That’s big news, not just in Europe but around the world, as other countries have closely watched the results of the EU’s strategy for regulating tech platforms.
The most relevant and comparable regulatory effort is Japan’s Mobile Software Competition Act (MSCA), which passed the Japanese Diet in 2024 and went into full effect in December 2025. Japanese policymakers thus had the opportunity to learn from Europe’s experiences and fine-tune their own bill.
As a result, Japan’s approach to platform regulation may offer some useful insights to European policymakers. It doesn’t hurt that Japan has a technologically advanced, high-income economy at roughly the same level as Europe. Moreover, like Europe, Japan is facing challenges with slow productivity growth that platform regulation is in part intended to address. Over the last decade, Japan’s productivity grew at a meager 0.8% annually, just slightly ahead of the EU’s 0.7% productivity growth rate.
With the EU’s DMA review coming this spring, this paper compares the Japanese platform regulatory approach with its European counterpart. It begins with an exploration of recent productivity growth in the EU’s information and communication sector. Then, it evaluates four key areas for platform regulation — user choice and security, protections for children, interoperability, and innovation — in which the Japanese approach differs from the DMA.
The U.S. Department of Justice and 10 states have agreed to settle the landmark monopolization case against Live Nation-Ticketmaster. The settlement comes in the early stages of trial, before the court heard testimony from witnesses. The case joins the growing roster of antitrust matters that the Trump administration has actively and prematurely steered toward ineffective settlements. This stands in stark contrast to judicial outcomes, based on facts and evidence, that protect competition and consumers.
PPI’s Vice President and Director of Competition Policy, Diana Moss, released the following statement in response to the settlement:
“Live Nation-Ticketmaster has once again avoided justice by obtaining ineffective conditions that do little to rein in practices that stifle competition and harm fans in live events ticketing.
“The settlement requires Live Nation-Ticketmaster to commit to several conditions. Among these are ‘loosening’ exclusivity provisions in Live Nation-Ticketmaster’s exclusive contracts with venues that stifle competition in primary ticketing and drive up ticket fees; the divestiture of 13 Live Nation amphitheaters; and a cap on ticket service fees at its amphitheaters equal to 15% of face value.
“This jumble of conditions risk the same ineffectiveness and lack of transparency as those that DOJ originally imposed on the 2010 merger of Live Nation and Ticketmaster. The company violated those conditions for years, at the expense of competition and consumers. The same approach, years later, is a green light for Live Nation-Ticketmaster to engage in business as usual because the absence of an effective break-up remedy preserves its monopoly power.
“Under the settlement, the live events behemoth can continue to trap independent venues in the exclusive contracts that are the core of the DOJ’s complaint, with little additional room to effectively use smaller primary ticketers. Moreover, the required divestiture of Live Nation venues simply creates new independent venues that it will target for exclusive contracts.
“Overall, the settlement’s gerry-rigged system of ‘access,’ whereby Ticketmaster retains all the control and power over primary ticketing, will be impossible for the courts to enforce.
“Finally, the settlement’s 15% cap on ticket fees is an easy concession for Live Nation-Ticketmaster. The company will more than compensate for the fee cap by continuing to squeeze out competition, steering even more fans back to its ticketing platform, and collecting monopoly ticket fees on tickets it sells.
“The settlement is a dark day for millions of live events fans and artists. The DOJ had the opportunity to finally get it right by fully litigating an antitrust trial on the merits. There are strong odds that the government would win on liability and break up the company to restore competition to ticketing and protect consumers. If the settlement moves forward, that outcome is now out of reach. The non-settling state AGs, under their own authority, should continue to pursue litigation and effective remedies on behalf of competition and consumers.”
Founded in 1989, PPI is a catalyst for policy innovation and political reform based in Washington, D.C. Its mission is to create radically pragmatic ideas for moving America beyond ideological and partisan deadlock. Find an expert and learn more about PPI by visiting progressivepolicy.org. Follow us @PPI.
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Media Contact: Ian O’Keefe – iokeefe@ppionline.org
This week, House Energy and Commerce Chairman Brett Guthrie announced a full committee markup of the App Store Accountability Act (ASAA) as part of a new kids’ online safety package. The bipartisan Parents Over Platforms Act (POPA) was omitted. After months of productive bipartisan talks, negotiations collapsed, and Committee Democrats say the Majority is “moving forward with a partisan package that lets Big Tech off the hook.” PPI shares that concern. Child safety legislation that passes committee on a party-line vote has no path in the Senate, and this approach risks squandering months of good-faith work on an issue where real agreement was within reach.
Our concerns with the ASAA go beyond process. The bill’s age verification mandates don’t just affect teens — they require every adult to hand over identity documents to download any app, whether it’s Instagram or a weather widget. The Majority keeps pointing to Apple Pay as proof that this is easy, but about one in five Americans don’t have a credit card, and setting up Apple Pay often requires a government ID upstream. The burden falls hardest on those who can least afford it. Advocacy groups have warned that identity-linked verification causes adults to self-censor and marginalized users to disengage. Requiring universal ID collection to use an app store also runs counter to basic data minimization principles — the bill collects far more personal information than is necessary to keep kids safe, and shares it with every developer regardless of whether their app poses any risk.
The bill also moves in the opposite direction from the FTC, which just issued an enforcement policy statement defining “age verification” to include age estimation and inference — privacy-preserving approaches that the ASAA ignores. At the same time, the latest bill text explicitly exempts third-party app stores, which happen to be the actual channel where users download adult content apps that Google Play and the App Store prohibit. And while the Majority has taken a hard line on the need for rigorous verification, the new version of the bill lets parents simply attest to their child’s age — an internal contradiction that undercuts the rationale for making every adult produce an ID in the first place.
We’d also note that the argument made by the ASAA’s supporters — that minors shouldn’t be entering into contracts with app stores — doesn’t hold up. Under U.S. common law, minors can enter into contracts, but those contracts are voidable in every state. Minors already have more contractual protection than adults do.
PPI continues to believe that POPA is the stronger bill. It’s bipartisan, introduced by Reps. Auchincloss (D-Mass.) and Houchin (R-Ind.), and supported by child safety advocates, small businesses, and industry stakeholders. It focuses verification on apps that actually provide different experiences for adults and minors, rather than treating every download the same. It gives parents real tools instead of burying them in consent requests they’ll eventually tune out. Our polling shows that 70% of parents want protections that keep working while their kids use apps, not a one-time check at download, and only a third think app store verification alone will keep kids safe. POPA was designed with those concerns in mind, and unlike the ASAA, whose state-level counterpart was blocked by a federal court as overbroad, it’s built on a legal foundation that can hold up.
Rep. Auchincloss has filed an amendment to Thursday’s markup that would strike the ASAA language and replace it with POPA. We urge the Committee to support that amendment and use it as the starting point for legislation that can actually get to the president’s desk. Kids and parents can’t wait for Congress to get this wrong twice.
Labour MPs and aides tried to learn lessons from the Democrats’ defeat in 2024, with several exchanges and meetings brokered through center-left U.S. think tanks such as the Progressive Policy Institute.
Claire Ainsley, director of the PPI’s project on center-left renewal, said: “The British government appears to be learning the lessons from the Democrats, which is talk about the economy in the way people experience it.”
But, Ainsley went on, “the Democrats also had very strong economic growth in which to do that and that is not the projection for the British economy in the 2020s. So Labour has to be very careful about not promising that people are going to be better when there are so many uncertainties.”
The U.K. government adviser referenced above added: “Things have definitely moved on from 2024 when there was this idea that doing kind of Biden-y things would result in being rewarded.” Likewise, they added, “[Trump’s] economic numbers are terrible. They’re not something to emulate.”
FACT: Refunding illegally collected tariff money is not difficult.
THE NUMBERS:
Illegally collected “IEEPA”* tariffs:
~$175 billion
Annual IRS income tax withholding refunds:
~$330 billion
* “IEEPA” is an acronym for “International Emergency Economic Powers Act,” the 1977 law the administration used as the basis for eight tariff decrees in 2025. The other tariff decrees, “national security” claims under “Section 232” of U.S. trade law, haven’t been challenged so far and remain in force. The $175 billion is the estimated actual tariff collection under the IEEPA decrees, and does not include required interest payments.
WHAT THEY MEAN:
Brett Kavanaugh, one of three Supreme Court Justices to side with the Trump administration on “international emergency” tariffs two weeks ago, explains his view at least in part by saying he thinks repaying tariffs will be difficult:
“The United States may be required to refund billions of dollars to importers who paid the IEEPA* tariffs, even though some importers may have already passed on costs to consumers or others. As was acknowledged at oral argument, the refund process is likely to be a ‘mess.’ In addition, according to the Government, the IEEPA tariffs have helped facilitate trade deals worth trillions of dollars — including with foreign nations from China to the United Kingdom to Japan, and more. The Court’s decision could generate uncertainty regarding those trade arrangements.”
A general legal point on this, then a couple of comments on the practical issues:
Legal: If an administration puts an illegal policy in motion, and courts later find it illegal, unwinding it can be messy. That’s the nature of Justice Marshall’s “judicial review” concept. Any “mess” is the administration’s responsibility and its problem to fix, not the courts’.
Practical: Neither of Kavanaugh’s complaints is very daunting. The “deals” have basic problems — all of them raise costs for Americans — and don’t seem built to last anyway. And refunding the “IEEPA” tariffs needn’t be messy at all.
With respect to “deals” and “trade arrangements”, they aren’t worth “trillions” of dollars and don’t look like they’re meant to last long. As recently as January, for example, the administration itself was perfectly willing to abandon its “deals” with the European Union and the U.K. by threatening new tariffs over control of Greenland. And if it now places high value on them, it can eliminate any risk by asking Congress to pass implementing laws that bring them to life. Earlier administrations did this 18 times between 1974 and 2020 for GATT, WTO, and FTA agreements. If Congressional support is there, the deals will be fine. If not, maybe they aren’t very meaningful.
And with respect to refunding illegally collected tariff money, no “mess” unless the administration wants one.
There’s no blurriness about who is owed the money. In customs and tariff jargon, the people who write tariff checks to the Customs and Border Patrol are the ‘importers of record’, meaning about 242,000 importing companies in the U.S., 11,000 customs brokers handling trade paperwork for small businesses, and individuals now paying tariffs on arriving packages. CBP’s “ACE” (Automated Commercial Environment) system lets the firms and customs brokers enter their payments in digital form with an 8-digit tariff code identifying the product they’re buying, the date it arrived, its value, the applicable tariff laws and rates, and the amount of money they paid. Each of the administration’s eight “IEEPA” decrees created special tariff lines beginning with the HTS code 9903 to apply the new tariffs to incoming goods. As an example, the April 2 “global” decree created 52 new tariff lines, starting at “9903.01.25” and going up to “9903.01.76.” So CBP knows very well who has paid IEEPA tariffs on Ghanaian shea butter, Vietnamese-assembled TV sets, Valentine roses from Ecuador and Colombia, etc., and the payers likewise know how much of their tariff payments originated in an illegal IEEPA decree.
Nor should the government have any problem writing the checks. Tariff-payers can probably arrange most of the refunds themselves, using the ACE system to revise tariff filings dating back to April of 2025. (Tariff payments typically wait around at CBP for 315 days, then “liquidate” as CBP sends them to the Treasury’s General Fund.) For the earlier ones, a bit more complicated but the U.S. government regularly does much larger and more complicated refunds. To put some numbers on this:
CBP’s “Trade Statistics” snapshot says that in Fiscal Year 2025, CBP line officers handled 50.08 million separate import “entries” – container unloadings, truck crossings, air cargo deliveries, pipeline shipments, etc. — with tariff collection totaling $195 billion. IEEPA tariffs totaled about $93 billion in 2025, and were running at $16 billion per month in the first quarter of FY2026. Assuming that remained pretty stable in early 2026, the IEEPA revenue total is likely about $175 billion. With interest, the government owes $200 billion or so in refunds.
By comparison, the Internal Revenue Service got 163.4 million individual income tax filings last year, and sent out 104.9 million tax withholding refunds, valued at $329.1 billion. So, twice as many individual payments, and 50% more refund money than the tariff repayment will require. Six weeks from now, in mid-April, they will do this all over again without any particular trouble.
In sum: CBP will have to sort through a lot of forms. The Treasury Department will need to send out more checks than usual this year. But it won’t be a mess unless the administration decides to create one. And either way, that’s not the Court’s problem.
FURTHER READING
PPI’s four principles for response to tariffs and economic isolationism:
Defend the Constitution and oppose rule by decree;
Connect tariff policy to growth, work, prices and family budgets, and living standards;
CBP’s “Trade statistics” snapshot. See “entries” in the top box for the count of import arrivals, and scroll down for tariff collection under IEEPA, “232” national security claims, and “301” unfair trade practices.
CBP’s introduction to the Automated Commercial Environment system, which importers use to file documents and pay tariffs electronically, and facilitates refunds of wrongly collected tariff money.
The administration spent a lot of time last year claiming that tariffs were a way to offload taxes onto foreigners, including foreign governments. Mr. Trump made the same assertion — “tariffs, paid for by foreign countries” — personally in the “State of the Union” address a week ago Tuesday. As the refund checks go out, Congress and reporters might usefully ask how many are going to foreign capitals and how many to American addresses.
ABOUT ED
Ed Gresser is Vice President and Director for Trade and Global Markets at PPI.
Ed returns to PPI after working for the think tank from 2001-2011. He most recently served as the Assistant U.S. Trade Representative for Trade Policy and Economics at the Office of the United States Trade Representative (USTR). In this position, he led USTR’s economic research unit from 2015-2021, and chaired the 21-agency Trade Policy Staff Committee.
Ed began his career on Capitol Hill before serving USTR as Policy Advisor to USTR Charlene Barshefsky from 1998 to 2001. He then led PPI’s Trade and Global Markets Project from 2001 to 2011. After PPI, he co-founded and directed the independent think tank ProgressiveEconomy until rejoining USTR in 2015. In 2013, the Washington International Trade Association presented him with its Lighthouse Award, awarded annually to an individual or group for significant contributions to trade policy.
Ed is the author of Freedom from Want: American Liberalism and the Global Economy (2007). He has published in a variety of journals and newspapers, and his research has been cited by leading academics and international organizations including the WTO, World Bank, and International Monetary Fund. He is a graduate of Stanford University and holds a Master’s Degree in International Affairs from Columbia Universities and a certificate from the Averell Harriman Institute for Advanced Study of the Soviet Union.
To achieve these goals, the White House said it would “unleash” the innovation and know-how of the commercial space industry.
It is a good bipartisan idea — one that took off in earnest under President Barack Obama — to enlist commercial players to modernize our space program. But execution is the hard part. And unfortunately, it’s clear that the administration has already shot itself in the foot by allowing the Department of Government and Efficiency to eliminate one obscure but important team.
That would be NASA’s Office of the Chief Economist, which the agency relied on for an independent understanding of the commercial space market.
If NASA wanted to land cargo on the moon, for instance, its economists were the ones who would figure out whether it made sense to lean on the commercial space sector, which would require a market for those services beyond the government, or if it would be prudent to rely on a traditional contractor. This was critical to NASA’s ability to work together intelligently with industry.
New York has been a leader in public health over the years. When it comes to ending cigarette smoking, however, the job is far from finished.
Nearly 1.6 million New York adults still smoke cigarettes, and more than 28,000 New Yorkers die each year due to smoking. Cigarette use is tied to more than a quarter of cancer deaths statewide and costs more than $12 billion annually in direct healthcare spending.
With such a staggering toll, tobacco tax policy should be about more than revenue. The way we tax nicotine products can either encourage adults who smoke to move away from cigarettes or unintentionally keep them there. That’s why Governor Kathy Hochul’s proposal to raise taxes on nicotine pouches deserves closer scrutiny.
Not all nicotine products are the same. Cigarettes burn tobacco and create smoke, which causes most smoking-related illnesses, including COPD and lung cancer. Noncombustible products, including nicotine pouches, expose users to far fewer toxicants and are considered significantly lower risk than cigarettes. After a rigorous scientific review, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration authorized several nicotine pouches for sale, determining they are “appropriate for the protection of public health” and can benefit adults who switch completely away from cigarettes.
Today, cigarette use in New York is concentrated in working-class and economically disadvantaged communities, among people living with mental health challenges, and among veterans. Most people who smoke want to quit. While traditional cessation strategies, including tobacco quitlines, can improve success rates, fewer than 1 in 10 people who attempt to quit remain smoke-free long term. Many adults are therefore turning to lower-risk nicotine alternatives to transition from smoking.
For years, “ed tech” was an umbrella term grouping schools, online platforms, courses, credentials, and software under one idea: technology applied to education. That shorthand made it easier for investors, policymakers, and institutions to talk about innovation without rethinking how learning fits into the economy. Today, it no longer explains what’s happening.
That’s the central insight of “The European Learning & Work Funding Report” by Brighteye Ventures, a research and advisory firm tracking investment at the intersection of learning, work, and productivity. The report’s seventh edition shows that learning is no longer funded primarily as education. It is increasingly funded as part of how work gets done.
Across Europe, and increasingly the U.S., capital is flowing not toward courses or credentials but toward systems that are closer to production, including hiring platforms, staffing firms, clinical decision tools, payroll systems, and compliance software. These are not educational products, though learning is embedded throughout them.
In these systems, learning is not the point. Outcomes are.
This shift arrives as the traditional pathway from school to work is fraying. The first rung of the opportunity ladder—entry-level jobs that once provided experience, mentoring, and a way up—is eroding. Young people are told to “get experience,” but the places that once supplied it are disappearing.
Brighteye’s report helps explain why. Learning hasn’t vanished but moved from classrooms into the operating system of work itself.
Astrid arrived at her community college to pursue a nursing degree with a high school diploma, a part-time job, and a plan. She was told she needed two semesters of noncredit remedial math and English courses before taking classes that counted toward her credential.
She never made it to the anatomy course.
Astrid is not a real person, but her story is. She represents the unspoken student story of American higher education’s developmental—or remedial—education system.
Strong Start to Finish reports that 40% of two-year college students and 25% of four-year students take at least one remedial course, an estimated 3.4 million students.
Over the past two decades, I have dedicated my career to tobacco prevention and smoking cessation, serving in leadership roles with the American Heart Association, the Truth Initiative and state health departments in New York and Ohio. Throughout my career, I have witnessed firsthand how evidence-based approaches — when implemented thoughtfully — can meaningfully shift public health outcomes. Today, I am more convinced than ever that tobacco harm reduction represents exactly this kind of evidence-based opportunity for South Carolina.
Cigarette smoking remains South Carolina’s most persistent and costly public health challenge. Despite decades of progress, more than a half million South Carolinians continue to smoke, leading to more than 7,200 deaths each year. This is not only a burden on the friends and families of smokers; it is also a substantial cost for taxpayers totaling $2.2 billion annually to treat smoking-related illness, with nearly $512 million of that coming from Medicaid.
The facts on smoking cessation are stark. Seventy percent of Americans who smoke want to quit, yet most lack the support systems needed to succeed. For every 100 people attempting to quit through willpower alone, only three to five remain abstinent beyond six months. Even health insurance offers limited help: Most plans cover only two attempts at quitting per year. This helps explain why an estimated 60 percent to 90 percent of adults who try to quit smoking ultimately relapse.
Fortunately, Palmetto State lawmakers have an opportunity to pass legislation that would provide people who smoke with incentives to make what I consider better decisions for their health and alleviate some of the financial burden associated with treating smoking-related illnesses.
